Classroom X

day two: resignation

Kikimora Karui had always known she was a cursed girl.

She was born under an ominous star, was the bearer of an unfortunate name, and had the luck of the world's unluckiest person. She didn't remember when her curse began, if she had been born with it, or if it had snuck inside her bedroom on an unhallowed night like an incubus, then crept into her bed while she slept, kissing her with damning lips. But she knew they had been together for a long time—the curse and her.

Little kids noticed injustices more acutely than adults did; that was, if they were the kind who paid attention to the important things, things that mattered, or if they were the ones being unfairly treated. More often than not there would be someone whom they could blame as the source of their misery: the father who wouldn't get them that curious toy saying it was expensive and then went and bought a much more expensive hair trimmer which he was never going to use, the mother who wouldn't let you watch TV as often as your friend's mother did, the friend who would never share her snacks with you even though you always gave her half your chocolate bar. There would always be someone to blame, someone to point a recriminating finger at.

This was not the case with Kikimora.

She had to have an open-heart surgery when she was seven years old because her lungs didn't behave like how proper lungs should behave. The surgery was dangerous, but it didn't kill her. Instead it stole from her—filching air from her lungs when she would be out in the wheat fields behind her old, rustic house playing tag with her sisters, or when she went swimming in the river with salmon and coots. It was not a very nice thief, it didn't come and go silently. It always let it's presence known, retreating only after reducing her into a gasping bundle of folded limbs, collapsed upon the stubbled field like a heap of withering leaves.

She couldn't blame her lungs. Because then it was going to be like she was blaming herself. But it was not her fault her lungs didn't behave like proper lungs.

So she blamed the curse.

She blamed the curse when she went shopping with her sisters and bought cuddly bears and she lost her bear before they even got home. She blamed the curse when they distributed activity kits at school and she got the one with the broken crayons or the missing sketches. She blamed the curse when her PE teacher made her run laps in the playground even though she explained why she couldn't, then made her run more laps because she lied—told she had an open-heart surgery when such primitive practices were outmoded in their century. She blamed the curse when she sat in the sidelines as her classmates played dodgeball, unable to join the fun. She blamed the curse when she caught a fever on the day she was to go on a school trip, or on the day there was going to be a party in her neighbourhood. She blamed the curse when the sculpture she had spent two hundred hours working on fell on the floor and shattered, and when the boy she liked wasn't even aware of her existence. She blamed the curse when everyone else seemed to be racing ahead of her, leaving her behind, alone, too frail and pathetic to catch up.

She had the worst luck in the world. Misfortunes hounded her mercilessly, ripped off bits of her like a pack of hungry dogs, all because the curse wanted her to suffer.

She was used to it.

So when the hologram came up and she saw her name, all she felt was dull resignation, and a weighty sense of sadness. She never once blinked as the hologram strobed before her, as though someone had forgotten to charge the machine and there wasn't enough power to keep the lit words in the air.